IVA Technology Frees Up Valuable Time For Human Agents To Focus On Complex Customer Concerns
One of the biggest challenges for a growing healthcare organization is providing highly satisfying patient and caregiver experiences. This is no small feat. Spikes in call volumes overwhelm the contact center. When agents and operators can’t keep up with the increasing number of calls, healthcare consumers become frustrated, get a poor impression of the health system brand, and are discouraged from contacting the same provider again. Patient access managers face the difficult task of handling large call volumes without making patients and caregivers wait on hold or feel like they are being rushed through their conversations.
Intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) enable a balance of automation and live assistance, ensuring each caller gets the support they need.
Conversational AI empowers patients with self-service tools so they can use their own words to achieve call objectives without the need for a live operator or agent. Callers are directed to the right resource and get quick and accurate answers to their queries. IVAs remove or at least mitigate the stress faced by human agents. An agent’s limited time is better utilized to address more complex concerns, while an IVA navigates routine calls smoothly. Intelligent virtual assistants are the best option for health systems that want to provide a better experience for patients and caregivers. They can handle unlimited call volume 24/7. They also personalize calls, maintain brand consistency, and improve the healthcare consumer experience.
How Can Health Systems Benefit?
- Scalability – IVAs are scaleable and help healthcare contact centers handle any unexpected surge in inbound calls. This deflects redundant workload from human agents, enabling them to focus on tasks that require empathy and complex problem-solving. See this article to learn about how AI-powered automation improves contact center agent retention.
- Self-service – Healthcare consumers want to get to the people and resources they need quickly and will self-serve if it’s easy. Rising consumerism in healthcare means patients have higher expectations. It’s not possible for live agents to deliver consistent care when they have long hold queues of callers piling up. With conversational AI technology, callers with routine requests get to what they need quickly, and those who need complex support get to a live agent right away.
- Personalization – While speed and efficiency are crucial for your patients and their family members, providing individualized experiences is equally important. This technology pulls data about the caller from multiple sources including caller ID, and EMR / EHR systems, and utilizes the added context to deliver low-effort interactions by personalizing consumer calls.
- Operations – In order to reduce operational costs it’s necessary to streamline call navigation and boost staff productivity. Conversational AI is critical for satisfied patients and LEAN business operations. IVAs enable contact centers to support much larger call volumes and handle repetitive requests so fewer calls pile up in the queue for live agents and health systems generate more revenue. This efficient navigation ensures better patient experiences and more effective switchboard and contact center operations. When managed well and consistently tuned and optimized, IVAs handle calls from patients and caregivers with accuracy, while also complying with healthcare privacy and security.
Parlance IVAs are purpose-built for healthcare organizations. We are the only company to provide voice-powered conversational AI as a managed service solution. We tune, optimize, and manage day-to-day operations so results and performance improve over time.
Implementing ‘low-customer-effort’ approaches to service and empowering support staff with more time to own patient and family member issues from start to finish, drives loyalty, and prevents unnecessary revenue leakage.
By Annmarie Block
